*except! I am working on a new project I’m so excited about (and I hope to share it with you sooner than later), so I’m planning to skip some Fridays here and there until the fall. I’ve turned off paid subs for now until I’m fully back here (and if any new paid subs want a refund I am happy to give you one, just reach out).

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The Book

Just like actual flesh-and-blood children, readers have strong opinions and seem fairly divided on child narrators. One of my best friends, who was sort of a notorious kid-hater before I had my sons, says he’d like children more if adults didn’t talk about them so much.

One reason people have issues with child narrators is that we all know examples of those t…

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The Book

Last week I talked about how unsettled yet obsessed I am with the cover of Jess Arndt’s Large Animals (the possible mannequin crotch, so many legs), and I’m sorry to do this twice in a row, but we’re back to covers today. It’s a little embarrassing to say how swiftly the jacket design made me buy Lucia Berlin’s FSG collections. I’m supposed to have come to her through the lineage and the praise, maybe through Lydia Davis’s advocacy (in her foreword, Davis says she’s always had faith that the best writers rise to the top like cream, sooner or later) but really it was 100% the stylish, sexy, centered objects and the sunset colors. The cover of A Manual for Cleaning Women is brilliant minimalism, vibrant coral, text mapped onto a hotel keychain that looks like you could pl…

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The Book

Over the years, I’ve recommended Large Animals a bunch of times to a bunch of people. I did it here, in The Believer, (I’m going to reference this interview for another reason later on too), and I’ve also accidentally called it Small Animals on more than one podcast (nothing like a microphone in your face to make you forget the name of every book you’ve ever loved). Hopefully people found their way to it. It’s Arndt’s debut collection, and it came out from Catapult in 2017. The stories are about desire and the body, and how neither one behaves. The collection is witty and unsettling, and Maggie Nelson called it “acerbic, ecstatic, hilarious, psychedelic, and affecting in turn… an electric debut.” It was shortlisted for the California Book Award and longlisted for the St…

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This is part two of two weeks with Diane Williams. Last week we looked at “Orgasms”—the story I think about the most—and this week is my all-time favorite Williams story. The narrator of “All American” is as irresistible as she is disturbing (the best combo). These two stories show Williams writing both sides of infidelity—the woman left behind and the woman doing the leaving. “Orgasms” was from the perspective of the wife, with her dark idea and her seashells. “All American” comes from the mistress, with her dark charm and her troubling past.

More context on Williams and her critical acclaim is in last week’s post. “All American” begins with one of my very favorite opening lines of anything, ever:

The Paragraph

The woman, who is me—why pretend otherwise?—wants to love a man she cannot have. She thinks that is what she should do. She should love a man like that. He is inappropriate for some reason. He is married.

What’s Happening

“The woman, who is me—why pretend otherwise?—wants to love a man she cannot have.”

I’m instantly in. She opens (very briefly!) in third person—“The woman”—distant, fictional, the pretense of objectivity, a character in a story rather than a person telling one. She holds it for exactly two words. Then she blows it up: “who is me—why pretend otherwise?” It’s the rhythm of someone talking fast, someone who just caught herself mid-performance and said fuck it.

But instead of switching to “I,” she goes right back to “she.” The mask slips, she acknowledges that it slipped, and then she puts it back on (for a little bit longer). She goes back to third person, all the way to the end of the paragraph. She lives in the middle—more honest than sustaining the fiction would be, not honest enough to abandon it. For now. The “I” will find its way back, but not yet.

And “why pretend otherwise?” implicates the reader too. Why pretend? Who would be pretending? The narrator is telling us that the distance of third person would be a pretense neither she nor we should believe. She’s not “the woman.” She’s “me.”

Like “Orgasms,” this is a story where you need to know what happens before the rest of the first paragraph can mean what it means.

Okay, so the narrator wants to love a man she can’t have, a married man. She forces herself to have fatal charm—which she can just do, apparently, because it’s a skill she’s developed—and makes sure the man falls in love with her (How terrifying! How aspirational!). After she makes him fall for her, she tells him she can’t love him after all. She tells him he is “in the camp with the enemy”—by which she means his wife. The word “enemy” gives her joy. The same kind of joy she gets when her brother calls her “darling” before hanging up the phone, after they’ve made some kind of pact together—which is how she thinks about her relationships, apparently, in terms of camps and enemies and pacts.

The “I” comes back and stays for good when she starts talking about her brother. Not when she's describing the man, and not when she's naming the enemy. It shows up the moment her brother calls her darling. After that, “she” never comes back and the rest of the story stays in first person. “Darling” isn’t a word brothers typically use with sisters—it’s slipping into a register he shouldn’t be in, charged with the wrong kind of intimacy. Is it a term of endearment meant for his lover and deployed on accident? Or is it something more sinister?

Then our narrator admits something: she knew about the wife before she ever tried to love this man. She’d known all along. Which means the whole enterprise—the fatal charm, the seduction, the telling him she can’t love him back—was never really about him. It was about the wanting and about the force. She says it plainly: she has to force herself to love the ones she’s supposed to love, and force herself on the ones she’s not. Love and force are not opposites in this story—they might be the same thing. Williams puts all of this—the brother, the darling, the pact, the force, the love—in one long run-on sentence, all tangled up together.

Then the story does something else entirely—and I'll just say that even writing this summary I get so giddy, because Williams goes somewhere really weird with total conviction. Our narrator takes us to her childhood, to a family car pulled into a garage. The others get out but she and her sister stay in the back seat. She's not done with something, she says, then tries again: “something isn't undone yet.” Already the language is getting fuzzy. She tries to kiss her sister. She tries to hug her sister. And then, even now, even telling the story, she can't quite say what happened directly. She rationalizes, obfuscates, and slides sideways into someone else's perception: “She must have thought it was inappropriate, like what did I think I was a man and she was a woman? I must have been getting rough, because she was getting hysterical.” The roughness isn’t felt by our narrator—it’s inferred from the sister’s reaction. Hysterical is the word our narrator chooses, dismissing this (appropriate!) response as irrational. The narrator forces like a man—she says so herself—and then describes the consequence in language that has always been used to disregard women. And then the last line of the story is the truth she can't turn away from: “I remember knowing then that I was applying force and was getting away with it.”

Applying. What a chilling word! Knowing and getting away with it are not the same discovery. As a child she became fully aware of what she could do and, more importantly, what she could get away with. This is who she is. This short, strange scene explains everything—the fatal charm, the married man, the enemy, the should. The whole story is the adult version of that back seat. The sister and the married man are interchangeable—both people she can practice on, force herself toward and then withdraw from. She doesn’t want either of them. What she wants is force without consequence. It gets more enmeshed. The brother calling her darling, the sister in the back seat, the married man—it’s the same charge, the same crossed wire, running through all of it.

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In “Orgasms,” the title names the explicit thing the first paragraph withholds. Here, the title names a category, and now that you know what the story does, you can feel the dissonance. What’s all-American about this woman? The wanting? The force? The back seat of the family car? The complete inability to pretend otherwise? (More on this at the end—I have a theory.)

“She thinks that is what she should do. She should love a man like that.”

We already know the woman is her (she told us) so these short declaratives read as a self-addressed list she's ticking off. And “should” is such a strange word to connect to love. The wanting isn’t quite desire, more like compulsion. She’s decided that wanting the unavailable man is what she ought to be doing, according to some internal logic the story never fully explains. There’s no authority figure telling her she should love married men, it’s all coming from the inside. This connects back to “force.” She forces herself to have fatal charm, forces herself to love. The should and the force are connected, both types of obligation that will warp into desire.

“He is inappropriate for some reason. He is married.”

I love this twist so much. The narrator is performing innocence. “For some reason” is a little act, a tiny theater of not-knowing, and she drops the pose immediately in the very next sentence. He’s married. (Oh yeah, there’s that.) She can’t sustain the pretense any more than she could sustain the third person. “Why pretend otherwise?” applies here too. Like Mary Gaitskill, people forget how funny Williams can be, and these lines kill me: that studied vagueness and then, oops, married. We also get the feeling that married is just one of many possible reasons he is inappropriate.

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Acoustics

“The woman, who is me—why pretend otherwise?—wants to love a man she cannot have.”

Woman. Who. Why. Wants. W is one of our softest consonants—rounded lips, open mouth. It’s the interrogative sound: who, what, where, when, why. The sentence is full of questions—one of them explicit, the rest carried in the consonants. The woman—who is she? Why pretend otherwise? Wants—why this wanting? Every W opens the mouth and opens the question. And then the W’s disappear. The rest of the paragraph closes down into flat declaratives and filed reports.

“She thinks that is what she should do. She should love a man like that.”

The SH sounds accumulate across these two sentences—she, she should, she should. Three she’s, two shoulds, the same soft fricative opening almost every unit of meaning. SH is the sound of shushing, shame, being told to be quiet, and it’s also the sound you make when something shouldn’t be said out loud (and this narrator is full of things that shouldn’t be said out loud). She should. She should. The shame and the obligation are fused from the very first “she.”

Notice “a man” appears twice—“wants to love a man she cannot have” and then “she should love a man like that.” The narrator keeps returning to the same phrase the way she keeps returning to the same type of man. And it’s “a man”—indefinite, unspecific. Nothing special about this particular dude! The wanting is about the structure, not the person. He could be anyone.

No contractions either—every verb is fully spelled out, like last week’s story. The lack of contractions in “Orgasms” made the sentences sound like a deposition, but here these short declaratives sound like a recitation. Each sentence considered, deliberate, reported back to herself as conclusion. The lack of contractions also makes the self-interruption of “who is me—why pretend otherwise?” hit harder by contrast. That phrase has a completely different rhythm, and the formal declaratives around it make the rupture feel even more pronounced. The composed narration breaks and then composes itself again (and then breaks again later).

“He is inappropriate for some reason. He is married.”

“He is” shows up twice in a row, in the same consecutive subject/verb construction: he is this, he is that. It’s a little singsong list that crudely flattens down. He’s barely a person here.

And then “inappropriate” shows up. It’s the longest word in the paragraph, and it sprawls after all those short clipped words. It also sounds a little like it’s been borrowed from a corporate or parental register, and it performs the narrator’s elaborate vagueness.

“He is married.” We land on that hard D, a flat hard fact. Married, of course.

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Why I Love It

Both Williams stories we’ve looked at open with a narrator trying to locate herself in relation to another person. In “Orgasms,” the narrator locates herself through what she doesn’t have—the dark idea is all that’s left. In “All American,” she tries to locate herself through distance—third person, “the woman”—and immediately gives up.

The New York Times once called Williams’s work “an operation worthy of a master spy, a double agent in the house of fiction.” This narrator is a double agent from the first sentence—she’s both the woman and herself, the observer and the observed, the one applying force and the one watching herself apply it. She can’t hold the cover.

This is the genius of what Williams does. This narrator knows exactly what she's capable of, and she has no idea why she's capable of it. She can get close to naming the behavior, but the why stays dark. This lack of motivation makes her feel more human. We don't know why we do half the things we do!

Most of us write as if we have more distance than we do, describing our characters with a clarity and authority that feels too scripted. We know what they want, what they’re doing, why. Williams’s narrator is compelling because she's too close to herself to see her true shape—which is exactly why the shape comes through. All she can do is tell you what she did and what she got away with.

What she got away with is the dark heart of the story. “Force” is the word Williams keeps returning to—our narrator forces herself to have fatal charm, forces herself to love, forces herself on, was applying force in the back seat. It’s the confidence that wanting something hard enough makes it yours, and the belief that force is the same as deserving. Isn’t that the most all-American thing of all? The complete inability to tell the difference between taking and being given—or to even care about that difference. To be all-American is to take what's not yours, even if you don't really want it. Especially then.

Hint for next week: Disappointed in Moscow (for real this time)

1. A reminder that I’m teaching a generative workshop about shame on Zoom through McCormack Writing Center (formerly Tin House). Beginning with examples from Zadie Smith, T Kira Māhealani Madden, Garth Greenwell, Diane Seuss, and Megan Nolan, we’ll analyze how shame operates as both subject matter and artistic method across genres and cultural contexts. You’ll write a bunch!

2. There’s still time to register for The Fountain’s Summer Book-Writing Intensive, which begins in June. We only run intensives twice a year. Get weekly live classes, sustained craft and community support, and a daily curriculum to finish your book-length work (novel or memoir) this summer.

Thank you so much for reading. I’m Kimberly King Parsons—my debut story collection Black Light was longlisted for the National Book Award, and my novel We Were the Universe won the Oregon Book Award and was a finalist for the LAMBDA Literary Award for Bisexual Fiction. I teach at Pacific University’s MFA program and I run The Fountain with Chelsea Bieker, a platform for creative writers (find us when you need guided meditations for writers, monthly classes, intensives, coaching and more).

I’m KKP and I’m new here! Please consider subscribing if you’re a writer or reader interested in sentence-level craft. Share if you know someone else who might be into it.

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No close reading today, but stay with me. I have two posts kind of half done, and I decided to take a little pause rather than rush one of those through. I usually write these well in advance, but I spent a lot of last week working on my speech for the Oregon Book Awards. That, and then repeating the phrase “Oregon’s poet laureate” over and over in my car until I felt certain I wouldn’t fuck it up. If you’re only here because you’re hot for sentences, you can visit some of my favorites from the archive like this or this or here’s this one from last week in case you missed it (has anybody really read all 14 of these?). Promise I’ll be back to the usual thing next Friday.

So, yeah, on Monday I hosted the 39th annual Oregon Book Awards. Last year I won the Ken Kesey Award for Fiction and was so surprised I sort of fugued out onstage—there are photos of me at the podium looking lightly concussed. But this year I got to be inside the night, which turned out to be really fun. Here’s how it went:

Just before I left the house for rehearsal, some crucial tit-concealing infrastructure in my dress simply disintegrated (Zara!), so my partner had to sew me into it (he then had to cut me out of it at the end of the night—extremely kind of him, both times).

In the Lyft, my driver told me when he was a kid growing up on the coast his parents used to put him on whale-watching boats alone so they could go get drunk in the bars. He mentioned whales because I told him that on a vacation more than 20 years ago, my ex-boyfriend wouldn’t let us go see a newborn wholfin and that I’m still mad about it. The wholfin is my go-to icebreaker.

In the greenroom I ate what I can only describe as a golf ball of goat cheese and talked about short stories with . After rehearsal my family showed up. My kids were wearing matching polo shirts and seemed unaware of this until I pointed it out. My younger son had washed his hair for the occasion (this never happens). Later, they ate brownie bites and charcuterie and were generally pleasant human beings. They are pretty much just people now, which is an exciting new parenting development.

In my opening remarks I talked about growing up in Lubbock, Texas with basically no books in the house—just the Atkins Diet Revolution (the meat bible) and a copy of Stephen King’s Carrie. I talked about being a goth teenager, or as goth as you can be when you’re a natural blonde and it’s a hundred million degrees out (so, you know, not very). I talked about telling scary stories to make all the other slumber-party girls scream. I talked about mountains, waterfalls, and legal weed. Then I admitted I don’t even really like weed (after the show, several helpful, glassy-eyed strangers came up to recommend various strains and dosages to me).

I got to talk about my favorite Oregon bookstores and residencies. And I got to say out loud that even though we’re sometimes made to feel like we’re fighting for every little scrap of attention in this industry, without writers none of this exists—there would be no editors, no agents, no publicists, no very opinionated Goodreads reviewers. I may have also talked a tiny bit of shit about Seattle.

At the reception, I complimented a woman’s butterfly sundress and she said, “Thanks, but it’s moths,” and I loved her for that. Another woman handed me her card and it just said her name and “Reader” on it, nothing else.

It really was so nice to be in a theater full of people whose only purpose was to celebrate writers. You make a weird thing alone in your room, and it travels across geography and time (and outlives you!) to find its way into the body and mind of a stranger. That connection will never not be magical (even when you’re dead and the stranger gives your book two stars and the review just says “Meh for me”).

It was a beautiful night. Congrats to the finalists and winners:

Children’s Literature: Michelle Sumovich, I Have Three Cats
Middle Grade & Young Adult: Rosanne Parry, A Wolf Called Fire
General Nonfiction: Leah Sottile, Blazing Eye Sees All: Love Has Won, False Prophets, and the Fever Dream of the American New Age
Creative Nonfiction: Judith Barrington, Virginia’s Apple: Collected Memoirs
Graphic Literature: David F. Walker, Big Jim and the White Boy
Poetry: Jennifer Perrine, Beautiful Outlaw
Fiction: Ling Ling Huang, Immaculate Conception

The Stewart H. Holbrook Literary Legacy Award went to Willamette Writers, a Portland-based writing nonprofit, awarded in recognition of outstanding, long-term support of Oregon’s literary community.

Thank you to Susan Moore and everyone at Literary Arts for trusting me with this. It meant more than I can say.

Regular First Breath returns next Friday.

Thank you so much for reading. I’m Kimberly King Parsons—my debut story collection Black Light was longlisted for the National Book Award, and my novel We Were the Universe won the Oregon Book Award and was a finalist for the LAMBDA Literary Award for Bisexual Fiction. I teach at Pacific University’s MFA program and I run The Fountain with Chelsea Bieker, a platform for creative writers (find us when you need guided meditations for writers, monthly classes, intensives, coaching and more).